WHAT A CONCEPT

by James Lincoln Warren

Enjoyable genre fiction usually strikes a balance between convention and novelty. This is particularly true of mysteries. For example, in the fair-play mystery, the clues are hidden in plain view and at the climax, the puzzle is solved by the detective; the novelty is usually in the nature of the crime and the solution of the mystery. Consider Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express—without their surprising and extraordinarily clever dénouements, they’d wouldn’t be quite the classics that they are.

I’m sure the Gentle Reader can come up with many other examples of novelty: if they weren’t set in classical Rome, Lindsey Davis’ Marcus Didius Falco novels would be pretty standard hard-boiled fare; the sine qua non of Rex Stout’s armchair detective tales is the amusing contrast between Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe; Dorothy L. Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise was a pretty silly drug-smuggling story except for the fascinating look under the hood at a 1930s London advertising agency.

I think that the novel ingredient is even more important in mystery short stories than it is in novels. After reading two or three of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee stories, there are very few surprises provided to the reader in the next seventeen—the story clicks along mainly on the reader’s affection for McGee and Meyer and Miss Agnes and John D.’s lucid prose and amazing, breathless pacing. But in a short story, many times it is solely the presence of some unique thing that makes the story memorable. The most obvious example of this is the twist ending, much more a staple in short fiction than in book-length stories, but my favorites are the inexplicable circumstance, as exemplified in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League”, and what I might call the Bizarre Murder.

This usually involves an unusual means for doing in the victim. I love to do this. Some of the strange weapons I have used to liquidate characters are a pack of hunting dogs, the Grand Canyon, and a coffee maker.

Using weird weapons comes with some benefits. First, you’ve got a ready-made hook. Secondly, you’re definitely talking Murder One, because the nature of such a crime almost always requires an elaborate setup to pull off, establishing beyond question the formation of intent, and thirdly, it telegraphs that the perpetrator is diabolically clever, a worthy adversary for the hero.

But pulling it off can be problematical. I once reviewed a story for an acquaintance of mine prior to its submission, in which the choice of murder weapon was a sterling silver pen. The pen was used as a tourniquet’s pivot lever applied to a scarf wrapped around the victim’s throat. This struck me as extremely unlikely—first of all, the pen would almost certainly deform under the force applied to it, and secondly, it seemed a rather inefficient, not to mention time consuming, way to garrotte somebody—why not just pull on either end of the scarf with your hands? A weird weapon has to seem credible.

One of the classic weird weapons is the air embolism, first (but by no means last) used by Dorothy L. Sayers in Unnatural Death (1927), delivered through a syringe. As it turns out, the amount of air necessary to be lethal was much greater than could have been delivered in the story, but that didn’t really bother me as a reader—even though it isn’t credible under scrutiny, unlike the sterling silver pen it certainly seems credible in context. That wasn’t the cleverest thing about Unnatural Death, anyway, which hinged on a change in the British laws of intestate succession, i.e., who gets the money if the victim dies without a will. Now that was so clever that I shamelessly stole DLS’ idea of how a change in the law can influence a crime and used it in “The Warcoombe Witch” (AHMM, November 2008).

One of my favorite weird weapons isn’t in a short story, but in Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice (1964), and that’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s garden of death. With typical Hollywood lack of imagination, it wasn’t even used in the 1967 movie, jettisoned in favor of your typical Cubby Broccoli/Harry Saltzman 007-Destroys-Multimillion-Dollar-Military-Industrial-Complex scenario instead. In the book, though, Blofeld has occupied an old samurai castle and turned its grounds into a garden planted with exclusively deadly plants and populated with lethal animals. (He’s mad, you know—quite mad.) The castle has become a popular destination for suicides, much to the displeasure of the Japanese government, who lasso Bond into going in to assassinate Blofeld—which he would have done in any case, since Blofeld had murdered Bond’s wife in the previous book.

Like a lot of James Bond novels, it’s a slight book that probably would have worked better as a novelette, although that wouldn’t have given Fleming full play with his exotic locale, and today it would most likely be too short for the current doorstopper novel market. But it’s still one of my favorites, along with Moonraker (1955) (another terrific novel that was made into an execrable movie) and From Russia With Love (1957).

Getting back tot he garden of death, though, I stole this idea, too, for an unsold science fiction story I wrote more than twenty years ago, although in my version the garden was a terra-forming effort run amuck on an alien planet, the science fiction justification for it being that the more competitive the artificial life-forms seeded on the previously sterile planet, the faster they would evolve and prepare the planet for human habitation. Only in true science fiction fashion, things had gone horribly wrong. Fleming’s treatment is much more elegant.

Which illustrates another potential problem with weird weapons. They may end up complicating things to the point of stultifying the story. My coffee-maker murder is a case in point. I took pains to point out that the murderer was prone to making plans so complicated that they collapsed under their own weight, thus making the too-ornate murder more palatable, but the first market I sent it too rejected it on the grounds that it was too far-fetched—even though I had justified it from the onset. In this case, it wasn’t so much a violation of commonsense (like the sterling silver pen not bending), but too much time spent away from the action in order to explain the murder. Once the story was made leaner and quicker, I had no trouble selling it.

Yes, I like weird weapons. I have a new one in the hopper. I think it’ll be a good one, but for now it’s a secret.